Poetry slam pioneer Marc Kelly Smith onstage at Lit Fest on Saturday

June 04, 2009|By Lauren Viera, TRIBUNE REPORTER

On any given Sunday at the Green Mill, jazz shares its spotlight with poetry. And it slams.

Blame Marc Kelly Smith, founder of the poetry-slam movement, who has been hosting the lounge's weekly Uptown Poetry Slam for the last two decades. Do the math: Every Sunday night for the last 23 years means Smith has done more than 1,000 shows at the Green Mill alone, not to mention numerous engagements elsewhere.

No wonder he's known in the poetry-slam scene as Slampapi, the "grandfather" of the now international poetry-slam movement. It has become, as he says, "probably the largest social performance art movement of the time."

Smith will share the wealth on Saturday at the Printers Row Lit Fest with "Take the Mic and Stage a Slam," a kind of a how-to workshop inspired by his newest book, "Take the Mic: The Art of Performance Poetry, Slam, and the Spoken Word." He has written and co-written several others on the movement, and this one is fairly instructional. In Smith's mind, it describes in detail what it's like to be a successful performance poet in the 21st Century.

"There are poetry slams all over the world modeled after the Green Mill's," Smith says, "and there are a bunch of principles and ideas that make them work."

Smith says the movement was started by folks who were marrying a very old tradition -- oral performance -- with the passion that it provokes. "Many performance poets now are like modern-day troubadours," he says. "They can make a livelihood."

The guy should know: Now a full-time author and lecturer, he got his start performing poetry in the '80s after burning out as a self-described "white-collar construction guy." He hosted his first poetry slam at Bucktown's now defunct Get Me High Lounge in 1984. The event moved to the Green Mill a few years later, and it has been attracting steady crowds ever since.

Still, like anything else, poetry ebbs and flows with the times -- especially within the free-form parameters of slams. Green Mill employee Laura ("no last name needed"), who has tended bar there "for...ever," worked the Sunday-night Uptown Poetry Slam shift for more than 10 years. Ask her what she witnessed during that time, and she laughs.

"It's anything goes," she says. "When I first started here, there were a lot of angry people, a lot of angry poems. The poetry has definitely changed over the years. It's not so angry anymore."

Laura says Smith has always been her favorite part of the Uptown Poetry Slam, "because he's very quick-witted.

"He's really good onstage," she says. "He's really good at handling a crowd and defusing the situation. When things got a little out of hand, those were my favorite times."